A Risk Worth Taking

by Brynn Kelly

  “The police are tracking us somehow. Or Hyland’s goons are, like with the postcard. Or both.”

  “We’ve established the car doesn’t have GPS but you’re the technology expert. How would they be doing that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, then, neither will they. Anything else?”

  He could almost hear her neurons connecting.

  “Not yet,” she said, eventually.

  “Keep me posted. In the meantime, let’s just enjoy the drive.”

  She sighed but let the conversation slide. Ahead, a hazy gray glow in the dark sky pinpointed the city but traffic remained light as they approached. A sleepy Sunday night. Scrubby trees and neglected hedgerows, a whitewashed pub, a petrol station, power pylons... What the fuck was he doing back here? He grew up wanting nothing more than to get out of Scotland, work in the thick of things in a big city hospital, do something important. Now he was a nobody caporal working in places where flushing toilets were the exception, and was slinking into Edinburgh under cover of darkness.

  Hard to believe that a week ago he was bedded down beside a dirt road in Mali, heating up a cassoulet on a butane stove. When they were told they were bugging out and heading back to Corsica for a debrief and a few days of leave, he’d got the usual hollow feeling in his stomach. While the younger guys were debating the best place around the Med to get shit-faced and screwed, he was picturing the stash of journals in his locker. Even Angelito wasn’t going to be around—and he could usually be relied on to have plans even duller than Jamie’s. But he’d retired from the Legion and set off for some shithole in Eastern Europe to look for the sister he’d lost in childhood. And Flynn, of course, had taken a leave of absence to protect Tess while she prepared her evidence against Hyland. Turned out absence made the heart grow fonder even of that Patty and Selma duo.

  Flynn’s phone call couldn’t have come at a better time, just as Jamie had been yawning over “A Modern Case Series of Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta in an Out-of-Hospital, Combat Casualty Care Setting.” Could Jamie fly to London to rescue Samira from a squad of murderous mercenaries? Hell yeah, and thank you, God.

  “It’s getting colder,” Samira said, twisting to get her extra coat from the back seat. As she dragged it over, she bumped his arm. He hissed until the pain passed. Something was still stuck in there.

  “Jamie, why don’t you take some more painkillers? They’re right here.” She pulled his bag of tricks from the rucksack and held it up.

  “I’ve taken the maximum dose. Any more and I’ll start vomiting, and we don’t want to have to pay a cleaning fee for soiling our hire car.”

  “These packets of pills—they’re not even opened.”

  Damn. “I was using another packet.”

  “I didn’t see another packet.”

  “I took some before you woke.”

  She pulled the laptop up and opened it, the white light illuminating her face. “Oh okay.”

  He let out a slow leak of a breath. Chill out, pal. Innocent question. And the lies had flowed like blood from a scalp wound, just as they always had.

  She hooked into his phone Wi-Fi, tapped away a bit, then pressed her hand to her chest. “We’re in range. Let’s find a place to stop.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle.”

  They crossed over the city bypass and pulled up at a golf course where they could feasibly be stopping to admire the lights of the skyline, which, granted, were more sky than lights from there—the castle gleaming white atop its hill, the clock tower and a couple of sharp gothic steeples jutting up against the black slash of the Firth of Forth, a yellow glow rising from Princes Street and the Royal Mile, as if they were rivers of fire. Another spot his mother would like. If he brought her here today, would she know this view? Would she know him?

  Not now, Mum.

  Sorry.

  He pointed out the Balfour, squat and grandiose, its facade washed in a golden light that had to make it hard for its guests to sleep.

  “Wow,” said Samira, her arms tightly crossed, hands clutching opposite elbows. “He’s right over there.”

  “And we’re not going any closer,” Jamie said. “We’ll blast him sky-high from here, like a remote control. Virtually speaking.” He lowered his window, admitting the city’s distant hum. The air was icy and still. This time he’d keep a closer watch for cops—and anybody else they didn’t want to meet.

  After hooking the equipment back up and loading the cloud server site, Samira stretched her long fingers above the keyboard. She froze. A muffled throb of bass music started up, a block or two away.

  “Something wrong?” he said.

  “If this password’s incorrect, the system will flag a failed log-in. That could ruin our chances, too. And they might guess it’s us and track our location.”

  “So if that happens we’ll get out of town and think of something else.”

  “There is nothing else.” She laid her fingertips on the keyboard and raised them again like it was boiling hot. “I’ll type with one finger.”

  She struck the keys slowly, the rhythmic tapping like a slow ticking clock. He instinctively regulated his breathing, as if one wheeze too many would blow her typing off course. She pressed Enter, her throat moving as she swallowed. A circular loading icon appeared on the screen, turning. His arm throbbed.

  “This connection is twentieth-century slow,” she whispered.

  “It’s nearly over, Samira.”

  “What if it’s not the information we need? What if he’s moved it or deleted it? What if it was all a trap to begin w—?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough. Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it, okay?”

  The screen blinked, and filled with file names. She turned to meet his gaze and inhaled, like she was sucking confidence from him.

  “We’re in.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JAMIE HELD HIS breath as Samira scrolled down an endless page of folders and files.

  “What is all that stuff?” he said.

  “Briefing documents, meeting agendas, draft legislation, contacts, itineraries—including the one for this trip... Thousands of documents—tens of thousands. And it all looks totally inane and legit.” She brought a hand up and planted her chin on her knuckles. “I have no idea what I’m looking for. I don’t know what Charlotte was pointing me to. God, we need Tess.”

  “We have time to sift through them. Hyland’s in Scotland for a while.”

  Her eyes flicked to a string of icons along the top of the screen. “No, we don’t have time.”

  “We don’t?”

  “This password automatically changes once a week. It’s set to change at eight o’clock tomorrow night. We’ll be logged out and we won’t be able to get back in.”

  “You can’t change that?”

  She tapped on the laptop casing. “Not without sending an alert. And I can’t disable the alerts without the system sending an alert that they’ve been disabled.”

  “Sounds like a bind.”

  The tapping became frantic. “Or change the email address the alerts are sent to without it sending a confirmation to the original address.”

  “Okay, now I might need painkillers.”

  Her fingers stilled. “I thought you said you’d already taken some.”

  “I said ‘...more painkillers.’”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I...meant to.” Idiot.

  “I really hadn’t thought this through. I thought once we accessed this, the solution would be obvious. Right here in front of us, like a...a...” She hovered the mouse over a folder and stilled, staring.

  “Samira? What is it?”

  “This folder. It’s password-protected. It’s the only protected folder here.”

  He leaned over and rea
d the folder name. “‘Trésor.’ French for ‘treasure.’ Pretentious git.”

  “Hence the treasure chest in the game? This could be it.” She clicked the folder, and stared at a password box.

  “Could you try the same password as earlier?” he said, hopefully.

  “If you put a password-protected folder into secure storage, would you use the same password as the storage site?”

  “I wish I had something to hide that was that important.”

  “And if we try it and fail, it’ll be flagged.” She flicked to the Settings page and opened a tab. She pointed at a partial email address, three-quarters of it replaced by asterisks. “This email address—it’s not a government one. It’s a private server. Has to belong to Hyland—a personal address.”

  “Can you break into it?”

  “Possibly.” She flicked back to the files. “His contact book is backed up on here.” She opened it, and scrolled. “This email address for his daughter, Laura—it’s a web-based email, easily hacked. I could send Hyland an email that looks like it’s coming from her.”

  “How does that help?”

  “Just watch.” She smiled, catching her bottom lip between her teeth.

  Oh, he was watching, all right—but not the screen. This was the confident, smart Samira who lay under the anxiety and the fear and the grief. Eyes bright and narrowed, fingers scurrying over the keyboard. Like he said, he had a weakness for empowered women. For ten minutes or so, she was so immersed she didn’t notice him shamelessly staring.

  “Is there any point in me asking what you’re doing?” he said, eventually.

  “I’ve created a virus—well, picked one up off the net that I made a couple of years ago, and updated it—and I’m about to send Hyland an email that looks like it’s come from Laura’s email address. See?”

  Jamie leaned over. The email was titled “Whiskey.” He read aloud the body of the message: “‘This one’s got your name on it, Pops. What do you think?’ Is that all you’re saying?”

  She pasted in a hyperlink. “Yep.”

  “What’s the link?”

  “She’s just posted a photo of a bottle of whiskey on her social-media sites, from a store in Edinburgh that’s opened especially for her. According to his itinerary, he should be at the hotel.”

  “Pops?”

  “There’s some correspondence from her saved onto his cloud server—it seems to be what she calls him in private.” Samira sent the message. “When he clicks on the link it’ll take him to her real social-media post about the whiskey, which will look completely harmless. But it’ll be routed via the virus site, and will embed a virus onto his email on the way through. The email server will probably catch it fairly quickly but it should give me access just long enough to change the password and the backup contact info, so I can lock him out while I run this folder password through a little decoding system I created a few years ago. I’ve just updated that, too. Meanwhile...” She changed screens. “I’ve managed to hack into an add-on on the cloud server’s site to temporarily disable their flagging process. It was as far into the site I could get, but it buys us time for my little password robot to hammer away at this protected folder between now and tomorrow evening. So pretty straightforward, really.”

  “I’m needing a lie down.”

  “This would be a good time. It’s a waiting game now—we wait until he opens his email and springs the virus, then wait for the robot to break into the trésor. Let’s hope he checks his email more than once a week.”

  “I have no idea what you just said or did, but I’m sure it was pure dead brilliant.”

  “If it works.”

  “You know, you don’t need your four Js to make you confident. You just need a computer.”

  She smiled, looking at the same time hyped and relaxed, like she’d been doing hard exercise. Or having sex.

  Kill the thought, caporal.

  “Maybe that’s my problem,” she said, relaxing back into the seat. “I’ve been without a computer for more than a year. If this works, I can stop living this awful offline life.”

  He looked through the windscreen at the cityscape, the lights liquefying as rain approached. “Just awful. Though to be fair, I’d rather be staring at the waters of the Med.”

  “It is awful,” she said. “I live solely in the real world.”

  “You poor thing.”

  “Okay, I guess you don’t spend much time on social media. But before all this?” She gestured blindly, as if to indicate her entire recent experience. “The internet was my life. I know switching off is supposed to be healthy and good for your brain, but do you know how lonely it is when you’ve lived almost your entire adult life online? Everyone I know lives in here and I can’t contact them.” She ran her hands reverently around the edges of the laptop screen, as if it were her own coffre au trésor. “My life is right in front of me and I can’t access it. Can you imagine?”

  “Honestly, no. I can’t say I have a single online friendship. But you have real friends, right? Like, people you actually see in person—or would, if all this hadn’t happened.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Well, there’s Charlotte and a few other friends from college and university but we’re scattered around the world, so they’re online relationships now even if they didn’t start that way. And I have a few old school and work friends but I’ve moved around a lot, all my life, so they’ve all turned into social-media friendships, too.” The screen went black as the screen saver clicked in, plunging them into darkness. “This must sound very strange to you. A guy like you must have a lot of friends—real friends.”

  “I wish I was the guy you think I am. You met all my friends last year.”

  “The soldiers in your team?” She counted on her fingers. “Flynn. Your capit—capita—?”

  “Capitaine. Angelito. Former capitaine. He’s retired. Flynn’s supposed to be the new capitaine but he’s taken unpaid leave to be with Tess. And a couple of others from my commando team.”

  “Awo, the guy from Texas, and... Okoye? Was that his name—the man from Nigeria?”

  Rain tapped on the roof. Jamie closed the window. “Aye. And Thor, from... Come to think of it, I have no idea where he’s from. Norway or Finland or somewhere. He doesn’t talk about it. He doesn’t really talk at all.”

  “Yet he’s one of your closest friends... So that’s—what?—five? Plus Tess.”

  “I don’t think I can claim Tess just yet. I hardly know her. But there is Angelito’s girlfriend. I guess if we’re tallying up I could claim her. I don’t think she has many friends either, so...”

  “Holly.”

  “Aye. She lives on Corsica with him and his son.”

  “A son? I wouldn’t have picked him for a family man. He seemed kind of...fierce.”

  “They’ve opened a sailing school for tourists,” he said, unable to keep the incredulity from his tone. Angelito was the last guy to settle down into such a normal existence. “Believe me, he’s changed a lot in the last couple of years, since Holly...appeared.”

  “Appeared? You make it sound like she was conjured.”

  “The story of how they met...it’s a long one. I’ll tell you someday—what I know of it.”

  She frowned briefly at his someday. Yeah, like they had a future where they would sit around and share long stories over red wine. And when they were done talking she’d plant herself astride his lap, like in the car, and nibble his lower lip, and he’d grip her waist and slide her in and—

  “So,” she said, “five friends.”

  He inhaled. “Pathetic, yeah?”

  “It’s about three more than me—and I am choosing to count Tess. You must have friends here, in the UK. Childhood, med school, the hospital...?”

  “You’ve met some of my former...acquaintances, so I think you know the answer to that.”
>
  She looked up at him, her eyes jet-black. In the course of their conversation, he’d managed to scoot across so he was leaning over her, the gearstick jamming into his thigh. “I don’t get it. You’re so...easy to like.”

  And so are you. He should shift back into his seat, reclaim a few inches of distance. He didn’t have the self-control, which was his basic lifelong problem. He should show her some respect by telling her enough of the truth to warn her off. “I’ve done some things I regret. I’ve hurt people.”

  “Is that what you’re running from?”

  “I told you, I’m not running from anything.” It was true enough, of this moment. Right now he didn’t feel like going anywhere—running, walking or...tap-dancing.

  “You just like the adrenaline.” Her gaze dropped to his lips.

  “Aye.” He sounded like he’d smoked a carton of cigarettes. He cleared his throat.

  “And being an emergency doctor in a big London hospital was...boring.”

  “Yeah.”

  Oh man, the fresh smell of her hair. The curve of her lips. Her vulnerability. Her brain. He had it bad for this woman. He let his right hand drift over almost of its own volition—almost—to find hers, and threaded their fingers together. She squeezed. He leaned down, she stretched up and their lips met, feather-soft at first, then harder, desperate, like they both knew they were stealing the moment. He released her hand and pushed his fingers into her curls, cupping her jaw. Sweet yet simmering with promise and intent. How was this happening? Did he have so little restraint that he could go straight from a feeble attempt to talk her out of her undeserved respect for him, to this?